The ultimate online studio — built for the independent artist.
Onomo started as a browser DAW that refused to be shallow — a real audio engine, written from scratch, that happened to run in a tab instead of behind a checkout page.
Then it kept going. Because a song was never the whole job. There's the cover. The video. The lyrics, the captions, the moodboard, the rollout. Today Onomo is a studio, a design editor, a video editor and a writing room — separate tools that can hand work to each other, all in a single browser tab, on any machine, free to start. The thing you couldn't buy as a kid is now just a URL.
Putting out a song was never one job. You make the beat in one app. The cover in another. The video in a third. The lyrics live in your notes, the moodboard on a pin board, the captions in some caption tool, the rollout in a doc you'll abandon by Tuesday.
And it adds up — fast. A DAW subscription. A design app. A video editor. A cloud plan for the files, a caption tool, a link-in-bio service for release day. Five, six, seven little monthly charges that each feel reasonable on their own and quietly become a bill bigger than rent for a studio. You're not paying for one tool. You're paying to be the glue between all of them.
Because that's the real tax: you are the integration. You keep the versions in sync, remember which app has the latest cover, wrangle the formats that don't agree, and learn six different interfaces to do what is, in your head, one continuous act of making. Every handoff between them — export, re-import, re-upload, re-explain — quietly costs you the exact color you picked, the timing you already nailed, the thread of the idea, and most of all the momentum. By the time the song is “done,” the rest of the work is just starting, scattered across half a dozen tabs that have never once heard the track they're supposed to be about.
Desktop tools
Powerful but heavy and pricey — hundreds of dollars, gigabytes of downloads, instruments and plugins sold separately. And each one only does its one slice of the job.
The browser ones
Accessible but shallow. A few basic synths, thin effects, no real automation worth using. They compromised on depth to run in a tab. We didn't.
AI generators
Type a prompt, get a song. Your name isn't on it, you can't edit the parts, and it has no idea what else your release needs. It's content generation — not making.
Onomo exists to close the gaps between those apps. Not a cheaper version of one of them — a single place where the studio, the artwork, the video and the writing can hand work to each other, so nothing gets lost on the way from idea to release.
Most of us started making music as kids, on whatever we could find — a cracked copy, a friend's laptop, a phone. But the real tools cost real money. The professional studios people actually use run roughly $200 to $750 up front, or a monthly fee that never stops — and that's before the cover, the video, the artwork, each of which wants its own subscription too.
Now line that up against the rest of the planet. The world's median income is around $7 a day. For a huge share of the people making the music that's shaping global culture right now, a single license isn't an inconvenience — it's weeks of pay. A $300 wall at fifteen is a completely different wall than it is for a working producer at thirty.
It's been there so long the industry stopped seeing it. We can't. Talent isn't the thing that's scarce — access is. A kid with the next great song shouldn't be priced out of making it, or out of the cover, the video, and everything else it takes to put it into the world.
So the whole thing is free to start. Not a trial. Not the studio with everything else behind a paywall. All of it — the instruments, the effects, every surface — free, in a browser, on whatever device you already have.
Studio
A real DAW with its own audio engine — 30 synth engines across every synthesis paradigm, 16 drum engines, 17 Ono FX, a full arranger, mixer and automation. Hand-written, not a sample player. Not a piano roll ported from 2005.
Canvas
A layer-based design editor for the cover, the single art and every post — real masks and blend modes, 185 fonts, 3D title text, AI generation with the credit cost shown up front, and one-click export to every platform size.
Motion
A music-video editor that hears the song as a score, not a waveform — bind any visual to the kick, snare or vocal; auto-time a lyric video; render frame-accurate MP4 in the browser. No render queue, no watermark.
Journal
The pre-production brain — a lyric editor with a built-in rhyme finder, voice memos that transcribe themselves, an infinite brainstorm canvas, and a planner wired to the songs you’re actually making.
Instruments built from scratch, free on every plan.
30 synth engines and 16 drum engines, each its own synthesis paradigm with real DSP — plus thousands of factory sounds, every one made on these engines. No instrument, effect or surface is ever behind a paywall; upgrades are for storage and AI credits.
Slide notes and per-note stereo placement.
Multi-node pitch glides where each segment can ride its own LFO, and per-note pan and width automation — note-level detail most desktop DAWs don’t touch, running in a browser tab.
One project, no handoffs.
The cover opens with your title and palette already set. The video lines up to lyrics you timed once. The plan stays current with your live projects. Nothing gets re-exported, re-uploaded or re-explained.
Foundry — generation with zero copyright risk.
Kit, loop and MIDI generators that are genuinely rule-based, not a model trained on anyone’s catalogue. There’s no training data to worry about, and everything lands as editable parts you own.
Ono — the AI that works inside the session.
Ono has never heard a song. She isn’t trained on artist catalogues and doesn’t know what anyone sounds like — there isn’t a copyrighted recording anywhere inside her. What she knows is music theory — the publicly documented building blocks that belong to everyone — and every parameter of every instrument in Onomo.
So she doesn’t hand you a finished bounce. She makes decisions in your actual project — MIDI patterns, synth parameters, arrangement structure — and everything she touches is a part you can grab, move, undo and call your own. She’s a collaborator who leaves the pen in your hand, not a vending machine that prints a track with your name stuck on the front.
That isn’t only a taste decision — it’s the safe one. In 2025 the U.S. Copyright Office made it plain: work generated from a prompt alone, with no meaningful human authorship, can’t be copyrighted. Type a sentence, get a song, and it isn’t legally yours — it’s effectively no one’s. Onomo is built the other way on purpose. Everything is editable because editing is exactly what turns AI output into something a human authored — something you can actually own and release.
Take Ono away and Onomo is still a complete platform. Take the AI away from most new music tools and there’s almost nothing left. That’s the difference between a tool with AI in it and an AI with a thin tool around it.
General information, not legal advice. Copyright law around AI is still developing — when in doubt, talk to a lawyer.
We could have built good standalone apps. Instead we built great ones that choose to stand together — and that difference is the entire point.
To be clear: these are still separate things. A cover doesn't have to belong to a song. You can sketch, experiment, and keep a dozen throwaway drafts that never touch each other — exactly like you should be able to. Nothing is fused; everything stays its own.
The difference is that when you want them to, they reach into each other. Open a cover from a track and your title and colors are already there. Pull lyrics you timed once into the video. Let the plan look at the song you're actually working on. No re-exporting, no re-uploading, no re-explaining — and no forcing, either.
The fragmented way isn't just slower. It's where ideas quietly go to die — in the gap between the app that had the spark and the app that needed it. A hook you couldn't find again. A palette that didn't survive the export. That gap is the thing we removed.
Separate when you want it. Connected when it counts. From the first hum to the day it drops.
It runs entirely in your browser — no installs, no gigabytes, no machine left behind. The same tab opens on a top-end desktop and a borrowed Chromebook.
The instruments are built from the ground up, not stitched together from samples — which is why a browser can hold a real studio without feeling like a demo.
What you hear while you work is what you get when you export. No surprises between the preview and the file.
And every surface speaks the same language under the hood, so a song, its cover, its video and its plan can actually move between each other instead of bouncing through your downloads folder.
Onomo is still being built in the open. Studio, Canvas, Motion and Journal are live and usable today — deeper recording workflows, real-time collaboration and mobile are on the way.
It’s honest work-in-progress, not a finished product. Things change and improve fast, and the people who show up now help decide what it becomes.
An open invite.
Try it. Break it. Tell us what's wrong, and what you'd build if it were yours.
The roadmap is still being written, and it's being written by the people who actually make and release music — not by a focus group, and not by whatever the market expects. If that's you, we want you in early. The people who find Onomo now aren't users we're acquiring; they're part of the reason it turns into what it's going to be.
None of this is finished. That's the honest part — and the fun part. It gets better every week, and the version a year from now will make today look like a sketch. You don't have to wait for that version. You can start on this one, right now, and watch it grow up around your work.
The music, the cover, the video, the words — the whole studio, free to start, on whatever you're reading this on.
Made with ♥ in ATL